


Melancholy Magic

by starswan



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: All Magic Comes With a Price, Angst, Angst and Feels, Dreams and Nightmares, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, King!Stephen, Love Won Through Obstacles, M/M, Magic of Life and Death, Mutual Pining, POV Alternating, POV First Person, Post-Book, Post-Series, We're talking MEGA FEELS, fairy magic, slight body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-14
Updated: 2015-08-14
Packaged: 2018-04-14 15:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4569354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starswan/pseuds/starswan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Autumn: such melancholy beauty. It has a strange magic all its own</i>. -Roxane, Cyrano de Bergerac</p><p>The man who was Stephen Black tries to adjust to his new role as King and is visited by lingering traumas, dreams, and the shocking result of his vastly increased magical sensitivities. It is rather angsty, but I swear that it ends on a happy note!<br/>***I labeled this as "teen and up audiences" more for the somewhat darkly reflective content/emotional pain, just in case. There is no real sexual content. ***</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Gentleman

Another night, another dance, the usual evening’s diversions as it has been for thousands of years in one form or another. Men were fierce and half wild roaming the green hills and the green woods when my court was in the first bloom of youth. They were an elegant race then, who worshipped the trees and the lordly ones of the air, the caves, and the sea. They paid hommage to my fair race and we were close cousins both in mind and in temperament. Oh, how the ages have worn them down like a cruel unabating wind and brought them low. They were once so very beautiful. Now they dine on ashes and want and worship the darkness, its gears forever grinding pitilessly to keep the enslaved populace in its mercenary thrall. Or perhaps that is to occur next week? I cannot be sure. Still, this age has already seen the decline of all that was once eloquent and mighty.

 

But I have met one of them. I have invited him here. His beauty is a wonder that has no equal in any of the kingdoms that have borne the distinction of my notice and company these past few centuries. It is not merely the thin veneer of his outer form that I speak of, lovely though it is beyond the ordinary. No, he is a stunning creature in every way that I can conceive! So honest, intelligent, selfless, loyal, discerning, and gentle. He has such a kind and tender heart. He bears the heavy sadness of his position in the human world with a lightness of spirit and a true nobility of feeling. It is awe-inspiring. I must do him a kindness! I feel so warmly disposed towards him. Stephen. Even his name possesses a kingly air. Though it is not his true name. I would set fire to cities and watch them smolder, minutely contemplating the patterns of their smokey remains in order to divine it. What an exquisite treasure! I must acquire it at my earliest convenience.

 

Stephen and I lingered late into the evening at Lost Hope while I attempted to coax words from his mouth so that I might glean all that there is to know of him. At length he spoke and once he began did not cease for upwards of half an hour. Generally, I cannot stand listening to others drone on about whatever boring trivialities they consider scintillating, but to Stephen I could listen for decades at a stretch quite contentedly. He has the voice of a lark and the phrasings of a poet. The love that I bear him daily grows.

 

I have lived centuries and seen splendors to outshine the sun, partook in horrors to chill the souls who wander aimlessly in darkness and misery for all the days of their lives on the far side of Hell. But I swear in this moment that there never was anyone or anything more brilliant and fearsome to behold as my Stephen. I saw him today treat with ingrates with such depth of wisdom, fairness and reason. How magnificent he shall look once he is a king!

 

 

The nights are so much different now that I have Stephen here with me. How did I ever bear all of those years in the same predictable company of my rather arrogant and boring relations, without his _loveliness_ to succor me? Lady Pole did lighten the mood for a while though I sense that she is not as delighted as when she first arrived. I fear it is that mortal life to which she must return to half of the time overcrowing her spirits. She and the magician’s wife have lately gone off together to some corner ,I know not where, and I would trouble myself more about it ,but for other more pressing concerns. No, I will not allow anything or anyone else to distract me from realizing the destiny of my most beloved companion. Stephen.

 

It is getting late and I sense something. It makes me uneasy. The hinges on all of the doors in all of the worlds are shook loose. They might not ever work in the same way again owing to that other one’s meddling. He is trying to loosen the threads that the Raven King wove together meticulously three hundred years ago when he left his other kingdom to its fate. Even I do not know whither he has gone. We were friends, once upon a time, or so I thought. I played with him when he was a wee child in Oberon’s court, we fought together, conquered lands and allied our separate kingdoms. He was everything that a magician ought to be: elegant, beautiful, powerful, creative, wild, ambitious, and without peer. Sometimes I actually miss him.

 

These thoughts disrupt my plans. Stephen is here. Stephen is _everything_. He is beside me. Always. I will not ever let him go. We shall join our kingdoms, be kings together so that we shall never be forced to part!

 

My life before is a pale reflection. I cannot remember what my mother looked like though she surely must have existed at some point. I think that my heart still beat then. Now it is like a mute stone inside of my chest. It is the only part of me that still ages. But rather than growing frail, it only grows stronger, harder. In Stephen’s presence, sometimes I imagine it softly fluttering as if it would move again if only for a moment.

 

When Stephen leaves each dawn, I feel quite desolate in so much as I am capable. I would take him to my bed, if I could convince myself that he would desire it. For now I shall content myself to drink in the rich and intoxicating sight of him night after night.

 

We were alone, at last, completely alone. I took his hands in mine, our knees touched, our foreheads touched, our lips touched. I thought I felt him press closer. Oh, how I have longed to taste him! My fevered imaginings paled at his vivid reality.

 

I brushed a hand over his face to bury the memory afterward. My chest hurt. It hurt. I actually felt fear. What if he does not truly want me? Foolishness. Fripperies. Foul thoughts. Odious. Melancholy. Ridicule. Want. Ruin…Despair…

 

I decided that the time is right, to take Stephen away with me for good, for his own good. I see his proper place now and he need not return to that other life which so ill befits a sovereign-to-be. We are going someplace. Even I cannot see where, but I have read in the stones and the hills and the clouds that it is at this place that our greatest, that is to say, Stephen’s greatest. Was it mine or his? Well, it is our enemy for his and mine are one and the same, and we must find them. We must _kill_ them. For Stephen.

 

I have asked and I heard his voice though he looked to be in a sort of trance. _Is he all right?_

He said “Yes.”  Yes! I will do this for him. I will kill again for him.

 

But what is this? What has got hold of me? Stephen? But it can’t be. I feel myself being carried away and I am powerless against it, the current is too strong! It cannot be. He would never. No. Not _my_ Stephen. Why?! I feel myself changing despite my own will. I’m seething, my blood is boiling. After all this time and after all that I have done for you. Why do you seek to hurt me in this way?! I hate…no. No. I cannot hate my Stephen. He cannot have betrayed me, betrayed my feelings! His eyes have changed! Someone has power over him, but I hear his voice. It is his. I cannot speak. My lips will not work. And I cannot reach him. It hurts. My chest hurts as if I need breath, as if I need…

 

The earth is closing in, the sky is closing in, his words are so close. Stop! Please!

 

_If you kill me, you will never know your name!_

 

All of the trouble I went to find… _kindness_ …it was for you… _I know_ …all for you..Ste…phen. I feel it trying to flutter for him. I can’t hold the pieces together. He is too strong now. If I still knew where my eyes were, I would weep. But I am surrounded by darkness. This is to be my tomb. I feel it! It feel it beating…but I cannot hold it together. I feel myself scattering like seeds, like breath..or rai..n. Or te-ars…Steph…


	2. The Man Who Was Stephen Black

I crushed him. My hands shook. I thought that I could hear him trying to say something. I felt the last spark of him disappear. I felt him die. The world as I knew it shattered like glass and I could see. It is done. I am so very tired. I thought that I would feel...better somehow. But I feel _nothing_.

 

_Stephen! Stephen!_

 

Someone is calling to me. For a moment, I thought. But I know that to be impossible. It is a _woman’s_ voice. I think I know her but I care not. I do not respond to that name, the name that… I was lying upon the ground for a time, I think. I must walk. Must keep moving. For there is nothing for me here now. There never was.

 

 

At first all was well. I had purpose. I do have purpose. But my concept of human time is fast leaving me. I think that it has been weeks since…but perhaps it is months. I had the feeling that even before, when I was with….I could feel my humanity changing just by being here for so many years, each night. I was changing even before I became King. I still sleep. I need sleep, more at first. I do not know his name. It is beyond my capability to try to say to it, even to myself when I think in English. I will simply call him “R” because it is a sort of R sound that begins his fairy name. He is always kind. Most are relieved that they were not abandoned. Some are reclusive or cool, others merely wary. Some are glad. Not all. But no one is hostile to me. They recognize me as their sovereign.

 

It is beautiful here. Peaceful for the most part. Things grow vigorously as much within the house as without and what is within as well as without is less distinct. Though I do have rooms of my own. There is a tree in the ball room that was dead before when it was L…that other way. Or perhaps it was merely sleeping. It is awake now and newly leafed.  I visit it often when I want to talk to someone other than R. I feel like it listens. R says that it is connected to everything, that its roots go deeper than I can imagine even now with my heightened awareness of such things. They can touch all of the trees of their kind both here and elsewhere and those trees in turn can talk to many others. They see and hear and whisper things that drift back here.

 

 

I have not been sleeping well. R is concerned. I feel empty and heartsick. What have I done? I forgot for a time or, at least, I could not touch upon it for fear that the mere memory of him would _burn_ me, whether with anger or with something else, I do not know. I had to meander around it in my thoughts, like a door to a room that I must not ever open. But then the other night, I felt it open a crack. I have become so accustomed to thinking in such odd ways, in symbols and images, visions. I have only to think in these patterns for things to manifest in the outer world. My magic is growing so powerful. When the door opens, I dream about the Gentleman. One moment, he is there talking to me, the next he is air and rain and leaves. He is nowhere, but everywhere.

 

A couple of nights ago, I awoke by the tree. R found me. He said it was not unusual. It was after all, familiar. It had been there before at Lost…at that, at this place, as it was when _he_ was king. It has changed as has this place, but they both remain. Constant in that one respect. The house. The tree.

 

R does not look so sure now. The timbre of his voice changes, his eyes are far off and sad. The fur on his face is ginger, but it takes on a dull aspect when he speaks to me now. I feel like he is keeping things from me. I could demand that he tell me! But I am not that kind of king.

 

_I am sorry. You intended nothing but kindness, I know._

 

 

I dreamt again. But I dreamt that I wandered for what seemed like miles, only to wind up back at the tree again. I collapsed in front of it, I was so very tired. I wept and wept until it rained overhead and the rain itself tasted salty on my face like I had summoned the rain not with an incantation or by lighting a candle, but with the force of my own sorrow.  Even when I awake the next day from a dreamless state to begin my duties, I feel as if I have had the dream again. I feel it even when I do not _see_ it. If it were real, I would have all but dried up by now.

 

I visited Lady...Emma Pole. R said that I needed to take a break, to go out somewhere. Things are running smoothly here and I trust him to manage my affairs for a day. She was shocked for a moment, but then pleased. I think it has been a few years since I last saw her. It has been more than five, but less than ten in so far as I can tell these things now. But she has not changed. She is like me. Not altogether as human as once she was. I bought her a house and gave her treasures, some that were…but I did not tell her this. I wanted her to be materially comfortable, to want for nothing. I did keep a few. One or two. Just one, actually. Not a treasure so much as…

 

But Emma. I was never more surprised to learn that she practices magic. It is, she remarks, her own, female brand. She will do magic in her own way and dares anyone to oppose her! She has my protection, of course. Nobody comes around whom she would not wish to see though when I told her this she gave me a very sharp return. Said that she did not need my esteemed help, that she was quite powerful enough to lay spells of watch and warding around the perimeters of her own house! She smiled when she uttered it. I have seen Mrs. Strange and Mr. Segundus though not spoken to them much. I am not sure that I could manage, would know what to say to either of them now. Emma knew me before and Mrs. Strange a little. Perhaps next time. I do not visit anybody else.

 

R wants to talk. He looks anxious about something. He is asking me about my..dreams..no…sleep walking?

 

“I do not understand you. I do not sleep walk and never have.” I say to him. No, that is the product of a disturbed and disorderly mind and I have never had either, not even when...

 

His eyes look sad and hesitant again.

 

“Grandfather,” he says, “I found you lying at the base of the tree…”

 

“Did you put me back into bed then?”

 

“My king, I am sorry. I did. I did not want to interfere, but I felt you were doing yourself an unkindness.”

 

“How so?” I ask a little ruffled.

 

“Begging your pardon. You seemed rather distressed. I hoped that I could, therefore, put your mind at ease.”

 

I am not sure how to return R an answer. I have until rather recently felt uncomfortable even acknowledging that I have ,in fact, been uneasy. Before,I was merely empty and busy, but at the same time more content and sorted then I had been in my whole life. It was because _his_ gift was lifting me up, holding me safe. All that I am now is due to him, whatever other horrors he may have occasioned.

 

I know that people speak of prophecies and of the Raven King, but to me he is just another shadowy magician who played with people’s lives. All that I knew of magic was from my Gentleman.

 

Why did I just think that?

 

R still waits.

 

“Forgive me. I was lost in thought. I am well. I assure you.”

 

But I was not to remain that way. However bad it had gotten, however rough trying to sleep at night with my lingering human needs, it was only a glimpse of what was to come. For now the door was wide open and there was no shutting it during the daytime, nor peering at the small gap it yielded at night when I allowed myself to visit that corner of my mind under cover of darkness.

 

You see, I was remembering when I had had no suspicions that there were things that I had forgotten in the first place. He meant me only kindness. He said that he loved me. No one had ever said that. I tried to classify it as a sort of love of a madman or some figure of speech that meant something different in his language. I felt pain I did not recognize when I would look at him and realize the divide that he could not see, the divide that my enchantment placed upon me. How wrong I was. I did feel tired. I did feel weighed down, but not always. It was just so hard to return to that. I felt him twisting, felt it moving me. But the real cruelty was how he saw me. How he believed in me. Was this a horrid joke being played on us both?

 

In the early days, I would tell myself that I had done him a favor, that I had spared him an existence rife with suffering, cruelty, and ceaseless escape into morbid entertainments that might, were he to have a soul, condemn him in the afterlife. Perhaps his kindness to me would save him. But that was selfish and wrong. That was what they taught me in school. I never did quite believe in a hell. My teacher told me that I was too tender-hearted. A person like me should steel himself against the world because the world would always bear arms against me. I would never be truly welcome anywhere. Not fully. But for him, I would have no home. But for him, I would have continued as I was, reasonably content. I would have felt secure, but never been truly safe.

 

We were never friends, not as he thought that we were. But if not, then what were we? I spent every night for ten years in his presence. I conversed with him on all manner of subjects, traveled, tried to stop him from causing too much mischief. I even laughed on occasion or smiled at something that he said or did. He would see that a behavior upset me and he would quit it. He brought me gifts. He defended me verbally and protected me physically. He put himself in peril because of something that I said. I had thought that he was impervious to all harm. When I held him that one evening as the lights grew dim all around us, I could hear him breathing with difficulty. I had never realized before that he did breathe.

 

He was wicked, his humors could be black towards others, but…

 

I think that I cared for him. And I killed him.

 

He gave me little choice. I think. Nothing is as clear as once it was. Could I have stopped him in any other way? Could I have saved him as well as saved Emma?

 

 

I have violent nightmares. Or else, I can hear something like a voice. I do not know what it says, but I have the impulse to follow it. He sang for me once. I thought these were just dreams, but I leave the large house in my wanderings and go elsewhere. I move like leaves and wind and trees growing. I can be nearly anywhere in a moment, but I often prefer to “walk”. The trees, they greet me in a language that I did not hear before. It was all around me; I could listen but not hear. This was what he heard everyday, I think. It filled him up. He was a part of it and it was a part of him as it is part of me now.

 

I lean down to hold a fresh leaf, still tender and green, that was prematurely torn from its stem by a strong gust of wind. I brush my lips with it. I inhale its scent, the scent of the rain and the woods and something else. It is like lightning and star light. It might be magic. It smells as he did. I can feel its magic bleeding out, disconnected from the source of its life. It will fade. It will die. I feel my shoulders shaking. I feel so human all of a sudden as I cry for this small slip of ebbing life.

 

When did I cease to be as human as I once was that I perceive this difference? Wasn’t that what he loved about me? I was kind where he was cruel. He thought me noble and selfless and full of feeling. My lights illuminated his darknesses. I tear through the leaf, feel it crackle. I am doing it a kindness.

 

But what is this? A memory? I am walking with the Gentleman, but there is something up ahead on the path. I do not know where we are walking to this time or why. Something small is crying out on a moor. It is alone. There are no more of its kind in sight. I can’t look for some reason. I hear the Gentleman sigh and mention something about it being injured. I think distantly that he kills it. I am crying. He tries to soothe me. He is stroking my face as he tries to explain that it would never hunt again. It would have starved slowly to death. He did not want it to suffer. He says that he thought of me. He wanted to do it a kindness. For me. But this feels worse somehow than leaving it to die. I remember now. I felt the sweep of his hand on my forehead and it was gone. He took the memory of it away so that it would stop hurting me.

 

I yell myself awake at this memory on more than one occasion, but it is not the only one. The next one is worse, so much worse. We are seated together somewhere in Lost Hope, all alone. He looks as if he is carrying the weight of a most terrible secret that he wishes to confide to me. I think that it must pertain to the magicians or some bit of prophecy he has overlooked, but I am wrong. He takes my hands in his, he moves closer until our knees touch, until our foreheads touch. Is he somehow ill? Is he about to swoon? I do not know what I am meant to do, but he is so very close and I cannot help myself. This thing that binds us, it is more than the enchantment. It is like the weird weavings of fate. Even I can feel it with my frail human senses. I lean in and I kiss him. I do not know for how long our lips dance. It seems like hours. There is something more, but it is too painful. I do not want to remember. I want to close the door.

 

Why?! Why did he take these recollections from me?? He’s gone. Yet he hurts me still. Hurts. Haunts.

 

I wander to the tree. I have to see the proof of the good that my being here has done. I need to see its fresh, green growth, see the ebb and flow of its glittering life flowing up through the trunk and out into the leaves and back again.

 

I am not alone. Someone or something is there. I know of all of the residents, but I have not conversed at length with many of them. Nobody else has the habit of venturing out here at this time of day. It is daylight for when I do sleep it is mainly in the day. At night, we have such a lot to do usually.

 

I see a form sprawled out on the floor. It is small. A child? It is lying at the base of the tree in the fine, filligreed shadows of its leaves and branches. I am only half myself. Perhaps I only imagine that I am awake. I lift the figure into my arms effortlessly and carry them to another part of the house. R is waiting. He looks grim. He mutters something unintelligible and takes the sleeper from me, says that he will take care of them, that I should return to bed. I have a little time left, decades yet, before I am able to properly assimilate the new energies. Then I will require little to no sleep.

 

When I awake fully the next morning, R is extremely evasive about our sleeping visitor. Days pass in a flurry of activities. We are to have a ball at long last, if I feel up to it. I wonder if someone’s child has wandered into faerie. Is it a human child? He never answers me.

 

R is being rather impertinent even in my loose definition of strict kingship! I finally uncovered where he took the sleeper who is evidently still sleeping. But he refuses to let me see. The door is closed to me and it is his personal magic that he has woven all around it. I cannot force it open to satisfy my curiosity without potentially harming him. And he knows this.


	3. Convergence

I am everywhere and I am nowhere. The clouds shifting across the sky might be my thoughts, the trees my limbs, the rivers my blood. It was dark at first, and I floated in the blackness, a spirit drifting on the currents of the world below. I clung to my center, what little I could sense of it and at length bits of me coalesced or else I was able to call on the bits scattered to the winds and we sang together in mutual acknowledgment. But that is all. I am both a prisoner and freer than the birds in the sky. The birds under _his_ sky. He did this thing to me! I know it now. In order to triumph over our bargain, he sent my Stephen to me to destroy me! Wicked, perfidious. Worst magician of the lot! He betrayed my friendship!

 

But Stephen broke my heart. He broke me.

 

I am not angry. Not enough of me remains to be much of anything. And yet I am sick at heart.

 

I hear something like a murmur or a heartbeat. Long thin lines of energy branch out all over the landscape. I follow them from time to time, but this sound-feeling is different. It is like rainstorms built out of the deepest melancholy. It gets stronger and louder each day. I imagine that I have arms with which to reach, legs to help me navigate the current like a frog swimming in a darkened pool. I follow the pulsing energy upwards. I stretch like I have branches and leaves. I imagine that I have eyes and I see a silvery light up above or is it below? I cannot be sure. Whatever this substance is, like light made liquid, it moves around me. I imagine that the eyes have a face and that this face has a mouth, lips, nose, ears with which to hear. It is getting louder. I try to take a breath but this substance is so heavy. My forward limbs are now arms, those earlier branches are fingers.

I feel a pain in an area where my chest would be if I had one at the center of all that remained of me, the part I so desperately tried to pull back together. I can feel it shudder and pulse. It is searing and heavy. It stretches and then snaps back into place. I feel bones and skin folding around it, protecting it, the streams of blood rushing to nurture it.

 

I push up past roots and earth and tiny glittering things and land unceremoniously on something hard and cool but very very solid. I am shivering and the muscle inside my chest that was a soft stone in another life is beating plaintively. I curl around myself still drowsy when I feel a prickle on the edge of my awareness. Someone is there.

 

Arms lift me ever so gently and a voice murmurs to me that I am safe, he will not harm me. I think that this voice matches the sound that I heard far below the earth or up among the clouds and rain or wherever it is that I have been. It was overflowing with sadness and kindness. I cling to it.

 

But now someone else is taking me from him, speaking to him about rest? I am still trying to assemble the sounds into a language. I understood him, my protector. But I do not understand this one as clearly. No. I don’t want to leave the one who found me, the one who told me that I was safe! The pain in my chest is acute. It radiates all along my new found nerves. It stretches across my recent skin. I am too weak to protest, to reach up a hand, to speak aloud.

 

He sounds as hesitant as I feel, but he relents and I am taken away.

 

I sleep for days, perhaps longer. Someone tilts my head to feed me. I do not wake up, not fully. But when I do, I think of _him_. Of the other one who saved me. I am told that he cannot come now, but that he will ask and see if he can come later.

 

I look down at myself for the first time. I am pale, like a pearl with that same lustre wearing a simple, long, cream-colored garment. It feels like gossamer threads on my limbs. My limbs are quite a bit longer than I remember them being when I first emerged. I have changed. How long have I really been here? I run my hands across my face to be sure that I still have one. It feels familiar, this place. I feel _him_ here, breathing in the walls, reflecting off every surface that catches the light streaming from overhead. It’s gentle, softly illuminating, like bright candles, warm. Safe.

 

There was a name. I held onto to it so tightly. What was it? I cannot remember, though I knew it only a moment ago. It made me feel bitter and pained, but only because I was cruelly ripped from the person who bore it. My love for this person burned me, but I clung to that name in the darkness. What was it?

 

My chest is warm, but too cool to be human. I can feel it beating still. It is slow and steady. I close my eyes to listen. I run my hands across my chest in order to feel because I can. I am floating in a half sleep and I hear a sound emerge from my throat. I think that it is mine. I am singing. I am singing to the light and to the warmth, singing to him.

 

* * *

 

I fear that we are at an impasse, R and myself. Neither one of us will raise a voice or a hand to the other and yet something must be done. How can I be king of my subjects when there is one among our number who is hidden from me? I was worried that perhaps someone in my court was stealing children and not telling me about it, that R knew this and was keeping it from me. But why? I never detected the least cruelty in him. I have been patient and believed the best in him, but I must know. I must see who is on the other side of that door.

 

I sleep and I dream of him. My rest is not a respite, but it is an escape. I know now that I seek these dreams. I hope for them. I wish that they were real so that I could speak to him once more. Just once. I never openly sought his affections and attentions, and yet I cannot bear the thought that he might exist in any form, hating me for what I did. I saw his eyes when I crushed him. They were full of fury. When I knelt to speak to him, he looked insensible with rage and…no….I still cannot look there. Perhaps I do not wish to know after all, how much I hurt him, if it is possible that I have hurt him so completely, even beyond the veil of death.

 

In my dreams, I sit and watch him sleep, sleeping somewhere under the earth. He is in a plain airy room with pale walls and a soft, warm grey light. And he is whole. I like to imagine him whole again. If I wait long enough, he might stir. But tonight I awake before I can speak to him. I hear something. It is unbearably sad and full of longing. It is singing. And I can read it as I could read other languages when I lived and studied among the humans who regarded me as an object, as a freak of nature.

 

I swing my legs over the edge of the large bed and I walk through the corridors listening to the song. It is not just within my head but without. It is real! It speaks of violent partings, of acute loneliness, but also of remembered joy. It loved with a ferocity that drove its beloved away. I am getting closer. This part of the house is familiar. It is where R walks each day when he bears that look that means “secrets”.

 

I stand before the door. My human senses have not left me quite. My chest hurts from the exertion of rushing to this spot even as I glide on the currents. I try to catch my breath. I have always been coming here. I think that I know why. I touch the wood surface. It is pale, bleached white. It tingles with R’s protective enchantments. The singing is so strong here that it enfolds me. I think that if I…perhaps I may do this without causing harm. I did sing once, so many years ago. I raise my voice. I do not know if I can match its unearthliness, fear to taint its beauty with my lack of skill. But I sing until the two sounds resonate joining my voice to his. I feel the wards on the door snap like ice fragments on a lake in Winter. I see R like an after image bowing low and stepping aside.

 

The door swings open of its own accord. I am greeted by a cool breeze that smells of rain and woods and something like lightning or star light. I walk into the room and turn to see, there on the bed, as whole as I had imagined him when I thought that I merely dreamt…

 

* * *

 

I have been singing for hours when I hear another voice shyly, hesitantly just beyond the door. It slowly grows in strength. It is deep and rich and oh so lovely. It is he who called to me out of that vast ocean of dark. One moment I hear his singing, the next there is a flutter and he is standing at my bedside. He is more beautiful than I could possibly have imagined. His eyes and his skin shimmer with subtle energies. He is suffused with magic. The very airs part in deference to him. I open my mouth and a gasp comes out like a sob. He is there in half the time it takes me to take a breath and I am falling into his arms. So gentle, so careful. I distantly hear myself weeping. I throw myself upon his mercy. I half-expect a blow. But all I feel are his hands stroking me, his fingers lingering in my hair, and on my face, sparking against the surface of my skin.

 

I try to speak. It is so much more effort than singing.

 

“Ssst...m...ple…”

 

I am not actually sure if I can speak words now.

 

He takes my face in his hands and I hear him.

 

_It is all right. You do not need to say anything. I hear you. Just…how has this happened?_

 

His eyes are full of tears. Is he crying for me? Can it be possible that my St…that it was really he who summoned me here after all that I did to wound him? I see it now, how we hurt each other. It was never my intention.

Singing and sitting up for this length of time have made me weak. But I make the effort to draw one of his hands to my chest. I hold it there. Can he feel it? I hope that he understands me. He draws me close and folds his arms around me, gathers me up like I might break. I cling to him. And for a moment I fear that I will wake up and find myself in pieces again. He lays me down and tries to resituate my aching limbs to make me more comfortable. He holds a basin to my lips so that I may drink. I am trying to murmur something. I touch his face and he leans over to brush his lips on mine. I fall asleep on a kiss.

 

* * *

 

 

I am still leaning over the sleeping form of my Gentleman when R discreetly approaches. If he thinks that he is about to ask me to leave, he is horribly mistaken. I’d sooner start a civil war and find myself having to set up court elsewhere than to abandon him again. He must sense something or see something in my looks. R says that my eyes flash when I am angry. Or perhaps it is because I am clutching his hand so protectively that he enters quietly and bows before speaking.

 

“He will grow stronger in time, but he will not quite be what he was…” he declares solemnly.

 

“What do you mean precisely?” I ask trying not to sound too anxious. “It is _him_ though…”

 

“Yes. Our kind do not live and die in the way that you understand it. For that matter, neither do yours.”

 

“I am in no mood for riddles, so please do not test my patience.”

 

“I meant no disrespect, grandfather. He is as you remember him and because he is fay, he still breathes magic. But it will not take the same form as it once did. You have brought him back and so now he is something somewhat…new.”

 

“I ? But..”

 

He is right though. I remember calling to him in the dark when I slept. I wanted this. I wanted him. Was that _my magic_?

 

“Can we help him? Is there anything that we can give him?”

 

“He is in no danger. But as you may have seen, it took some time for him to grow to his present form. It will take yet more time for him to be fully mended.”

 

“I would have seen, if you had allowed me.”

 

“I did not mean to be dishonest, grandfather I was…concerned that you might still harbor… conflicts. I feared that you would harm each other. Such a conflict would also disrupt the energies of this place that we have worked so hard to heal.”

 

I saw the truth in what he said. I was relieved that he was no longer keeping things from me however.

 

“And I had to know, what his true nature is. I had to know that he is not a threat.”

 

“Thank you…for all that you have done. I cannot express enough how deeply I appreciate it. I can take care of him now.” I say to him as I brush some of the Gentleman’s hair from out of his face.

 

R bows again and retreats slowly.

 

His hair is the same oddish hue, the same texture though perhaps a little bit longer. His features still look sculpted and a little..pointy, his brow dramatic. But he looks “younger” somehow. Though he looked to be in the bloom of youth before or perhaps on the edge of it, both very young and very old, he looks less severe now. I do not know that I would ever use the word “innocent” to describe him, but he looks so very radiant. I can feel energies thrumming beneath the surface of his skin busily weaving and reweaving.

 

 

 

 

The Gentleman grows stronger by the day though he still has a hard time handling speech. It exhausts him. He can sing songs in their language, sing, but not speak plainly. He is unable to speak outwardly any human languages though he can understand all that is said to him. R assures me that this will likely alter. I think he is merely trying to be kind. I confess that I do not mind. A part of me still likes to anticipate his wants and to provide things for him before he can ask. I suppose there are some aspects of me from my prior life that I will never fully untrain.

 

Lessened speech does not seem to impair him all that much as he is quite skilled at shooting annoyed and even dark looks at a moment’s notice to convey his displeasures. If I listen closely I can hear him in my mind, especially when we are alone in my rooms away from the others. There is still a bit of an edge to his playfulness and a morbid taint to his humor, but he is calmer somehow. He uses his wit and his charms to tease and to provoke, but never in a wantonly cruel fashion, not even when he is the one behind some fresh mischief. He mostly sings or plays upon the flute to communicate with others aloud. Fortunately, outward speech is not the primary way in which people in Faerie talk.

 

The Gentleman’s playing upon the violin in particular is exceptionally lovely! I am quite selfish and wish to hoard his playing for myself. I needn’t have asked, for my Gentleman conveys that it is for me alone that he plays such sweet strains.

 

He is well enough to travel about and to assist me. He cannot channel the magnitude of energies that he once commanded as a king. His powers are far weaker. The birds and the stones and the trees all still love him though, almost as much as I.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
